PeterS wrote:
Come to Texas or Oklahoma. Those are two of the trashiest states I've ever seen and Republicans run both of them...
True story:
I got out of the Navy in '84 and went to my old digs in Perris, CA. Perris was growing at the time but there was still a lot of rural areas, hills, mountains, canyons and dirt roads.
People dumped trash and junk everywhere out of sight...and in those days no one was picking any of it up.
One day I was cresting a hill on a dirt road next to Lake Perris amazed at the amount of rubbish, much of it completely and lucratively recyclable when there it was...the "I've seen everything" moment in illegal dumping, a dead, burnt mobile home...they even dumped houses!
Cars, trucks, trailers, appliances, demolished barns with usable wood, concrete blocks and bricks, electrical boxes, copper wire, steel cable, cast iron, copper and brass plumbing,
decades of aluminum cans, pop bottles, colored glass... I saw dollar signs and for a few years, when I could, I'd take a cruise and pick up a load of the easiest and best junk and take it to Riverside Scrap. Got to know the folks who ran the place pretty well and it paid off a little later when scads of folks not qualified to buy a house were defaulting on their loans a years or so later leaving new neighborhoods half-deserted ghost towns with houses full of whatever the inhabitants couldn't take.
Got a job with a subcontractor who cleaned houses for HUD. $12.50 an hour, 25c a mile, dump fees and I could keep whatever I found!
In one place I found 60 phone booths...the big glass-enclosed aluminum ones, not those things that hang on a wall. 6063 aluminum to be precise.
One place was full of furniture and appliances, the garage was full of building supplies and tools [I]and the attic was full of new art supplies, frames, brushes, canvasses, posterboards, chalk, pencils, charcoals, paints and water colors. Crazy!
Result: I was a preferred customer at the scrapyards and had hellacious yard sales.
The only trash in the hills now is broken concrete and rotten wood. Recycling kinda took off after that.